All your favorites are here such as unclothed sex, breast feeding at work
and the one that started it all, Salman Rushdie!!!!
Salman Rushdie
Who: Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran
What: A fatwa is simply a religious ruling in Islam—most
often, it seems, fatwas are about sexual matters—but Westerners usually
associate the term with the notorious 1989 death sentence against British author
Salman Rushdie. At the time, Khomeini was seeking to distract his followers from
the pointless slaughter of the recently ended Iran-Iraq war, during which hundreds
of thousands of Iranians were killed and wounded.
Unclothed sex
Who: Rashad Hassan Khalil, former dean of Islamic law at al-Azhar
University in Cairo, Egypt
What: When Khalil ruled in January 2006 that for married couples,
“being completely naked during the act of coitus annuls the marriage,”
liberal Egyptians howled with derision. Other scholars rejected Khalil’s
logic on the grounds that everything but “sodomy” is halal in a marriage.
Pokémon
Who: Saudi Arabia’s Higher Committee for Scientific
Research and Islamic Law
What: Denouncing the lovable Japanese cartoon characters as
having “possessed the minds” of Saudi youngsters, Saudi Arabia’s
highest religious authority banned Pokémon video games and cards in the
spring of 2001. Not only do Saudi scholars believe that Pokémon encourages
gambling, which is forbidden in Islam, but it is apparently a front for Israel
as well.
Polio vaccine
Who: Local mullahs in rural Pakistan
What: Pakistan’s largest Islamist umbrella group, the
Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), issued a fatwa in January 2007 endorsing the provincial
government’s efforts to immunize children from polio in the country’s
Northwest Frontier Province.
Breast-feeding
Who: Ezzat Atiya, a lecturer at Cairo’s al-Azhar University
What: Many Muslims believe that unmarried men and women should
not work alone together—a stricture that can pose problems in today’s
global economy. So one Islamic scholar came up with a novel solution: If a woman
were to breast-feed her male colleague five times, the two could safely be alone
together. “A woman at work can take off the veil or reveal her hair in front
of someone whom she breast-fed,” he wrote in an opinion issued in May 2007.
